Mapping disease transmission risk is crucial in public and animal health for evidence based decision-making. Ecology and epidemiology are highly related disciplines that may contribute to improvements in mapping disease, which can be used to answer health related questions. Ecological niche modeling is increasingly used for understanding the biogeography of diseases in plants, animals, and huma...

The ecological niche is the set of environments in which a population of a species can persist without introduction of individuals from other locations. A good mathematical or computational representation of the niche is a prerequisite to addressing many questions in ecology, biogeography, evolutionary biology and conservation. A particularly challenging question for ecological niche modelling ...

Niche construction theory (NCT) explicitly recognizes environmental modification by organisms (“niche construction”) and their legacy over time (“ecological inheritance”) to be evolutionary processes in their own right. Here we illustrate how niche construction theory provides useful conceptual tools and theoretical insights for integrating ecosystem ecology and evolutionary theory. We begin by...

Interspecific competition is a dominant force in animal communities that induces niche shifts in ecological and evolutionary time. If competition occurs, niche expansion can be expected when the competitor disappears because resources previously inaccessible due to competitive constraints can then be exploited (i.e., ecological release). Here, we aimed to determine the potential effects of inte...

Niche construction can generate ecological and evolutionary feedbacks that have been underinvestigated so far. We present an eco-evolutionary model that incorporates the process of niche construction to reveal its effects on the ecology and evolution of the niche-constructing agent. We consider a simple plant-soil nutrient ecosystem in which plants have the ability to increase the input of inor...

Disease biogeography is currently a promising field to complement epidemiology, and ecological niche modeling theory and methods are a key component. Therefore, applying the concepts and tools from ecological niche modeling to disease biogeography and epidemiology will provide biologically sound and analytically robust descriptive and predictive analyses of disease distributions. As a case stud...

Theniche is an abstract concept that describes the ecological space that a species occupies. A species’ niche is determined by the environmental conditions it inhabits, the resources it uses, and its interactions with other species. The niche has been a fundamental concept in ecological theory for almost a century. It was first developed by American zoologist Joseph Grinnell and English zoologi...

BACKGROUND Cryptococcus gattii emerged on Vancouver Island, British Columbia (BC), Canada, in 1999, causing human and animal illness. Environmental sampling for C.gattii in southwestern BC has isolated the fungal organism from native vegetation, soil, air, and water. OBJECTIVES Our aim was to help public health officials in BC delineate where C.gattii is currently established and forecast are...

There is extensive evidence that some species of ecological generalists, which use a wide diversity of resources, are in fact heterogeneous collections of relatively specialized individuals. This within-population variation, or "individual specialization," is a key requirement for frequency-dependent interactions that may drive a variety of types of evolutionary diversification and may influenc...